Your Weekly Van Loon: A Pope Is Rescued

We interrupt our regularly scheduled stupid to bring you the following message from the great Hendrik van Loon, author, journalist, confidant of presidents, teacher of America's young people, and renowned eccentric prose stylist. This week's lesson comes to us from Van Loon's masterwork, The Story Of Mankind, which he published in 1921, in which we discover that Charlemagne was not one to leave popes lying around in the street like banana peels.

The Pope, Leo III, had been attacked by a band of Roman rowdies and had been left for dead in the street. Some kind people had bandaged his wounds and had helped him to escape to the camp of Charles, where he asked for help. An army of Franks soon restored quiet and carried Leo back to the Lateran Palace which ever since the days of Constantine, had been the home of the Pope.

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"Bandaged his wounds"? A mob made up of the relatives of the previous pope, Adrian I, attacked Leo and tried to rip out his tongue and pluck out his eyes. Van Loon's gift for understatement remains profound.